Live Ubuntu Gerris distribution

From Gerris

Using this ISO image, you can boot a complete Ubuntu system with Gerris pre-installed from a USB memory stick. The distribution also includes various utilities which are useful in association with Gerris: emacs, gnuplot, ffmpeg, meshlab, blender, gmsh etc... The base system is a standard Ubuntu 10.04.2 LTS distribution.

This image is built to work on any 32 or 64 bits Intel-compatible system.

When you follow the instructions it is also a good idea to use the "Persistence" option of the installer. This will create a persistent home directory on the USB drive which will hold your data between successive reboots.

Note that running the distribution from the USB stick won't modify the operating system already installed on your machine in any way. If you are happy with the system, you can choose to install it permanently on your hard drive (with the option to share it with the other operating system).

Find a Linux system somewhere (a Virtual Box linux system on your Mac will do too)

Follow the instructions below on the Linux system to create the bootable USB stick (copied verbatim from here)

Note that, if prepared this way, the USB stick can be used to boot any (Intel-compatible) system (not just your Mac).

With release of Lucid Beta it was time to upgrade my MacBook as well. However the cdrom on my Mac is non functional. I was stuck with using the live usb stick. But unfortunately MacTel EFI firmware has a poor support for booting from USB sticks. There is long list of web pages on net that will tell you to try it once and give up if it doesn't work. The USB stick created with Ubuntu's live image creator did not work at all. It keeps giving message "BOOT ERROR" after the reFIT tries to load the disk.

But all hope is not lost. After a loooooonnnnnng search and countless number of permutations finally I found a solutions. The trick is to make the live USB stick with no partitions. By formatting your USB stick to VFAT directly without creating any partitions on it apple's firmware will be able to boot from it.

However if you format your disk directly with VFAT, the usb disk creator from Ubuntu refuses to use this disk as a target. Asking the utility to format it, will result in the /dev/sdb1 partition being created again. So you will have to create the live image manually. But it does work fine in the end. Read on for full howto.

Insert your usb disk and find out which drive it is enumerated as (dmesg will tell you).

For rest of the instructions we will use /dev/sdX, be careful to replace it with appropriate drive since you might otherwise erase you hard disks.

WARNING: use these instructions at your own risk. DO NOT JUST COPY PASTE COMMANDS without understanding the intent. You have been warned, these may burn your house down and kill your dog. I won't be responsible.

1. Format the USB stick

sudo mkfs.vfat /dev/sdX -I

WARNING: this will erase your entire USB stick, no data will be recoverable. Make sure you have already copied whatever you needed to someplace else.